Has Silas been telling tales? Nick feels like a truant schoolboy caught at the park. He returns to looking at illustrations from Colorquake, which the animators will weave throughout the movie. At times, Nick’s acting will be green-screened, stitched into the backdrop of Lear’s imagination: a technical frontier he’s eager to cross, since every story in which he’s acted so far has been set in literally fabricated surroundings.
By now, Nick has committed the book to heart, every picture, every word. It begins, famously, Ivo’s mother kept a perfect house, a house among the trees. In a lilting paragraph, printed in large white type on black ground—by far the most text on any one page—the perfection of the house is described. The sofas were serene, the bedrooms were bucolic, the rugs were resplendent….The final sentence on the page is Ivo’s mother called him her budding artist, her little Cézanne, and she loved him like no one else, but she didn’t want his colors to spill on her perfect armchairs, her perfect lamps, or her perfectly framed perfect paintings by artists more famous than Ivo who lived and died a very long time ago. All this perfection, visually if not verbally, is left to the reader’s imagination—and the vocabulary signals to any remotely clever child that there will be no condescension here. In a way, the words are beside the point, as if that daunting passage is nothing but a heavy door to be pushed aside, perhaps like the one that Ivo opens a short while later.
A turn of the page reveals a wide double spread of intoxicating softly penciled color. Balanced on one bare foot, smiling gaily, brandishing a dripping brush, a wee lad stands in the middle of a windowless room whose walls are mostly (but not yet entirely) covered with a tropical fantasia: tall spiky trees and flowers, toucans, parrots, butterflies. On one wall, where he has only begun to paint this jungle, you can see his previous painting: a cityscape, about to be engulfed—or overgrown. The only piece of furniture in the room is a step stool, draped with a color-stained rag.
Barely noticeable, hugging the bottom margin of the two pages, runs the text So Ivo’s mother gave him the cellar, all of it. It was his to decorate however he pleased. Sometimes Ivo stayed there all day long. Yet suddenly, perhaps deliberately, the words cease to matter so much, because to all but the most heartless reader, Ivo himself is utterly beguiling, from his stubby, paint-stained toenails to the multiple cowlicks that rise in inky tufts from a head as round as a billiards ball. (Every mother who sees him must long to hold him in her lap and comb his unruly hair.)
Until the day of the earthquake.
Ivo is so busy painting in his windowless cellar that he toils on without realizing that the house above him is shaking. In a trio of wordless illustrations, the reader sees him on tiptoe, rendering a passionflower; up on the stool, one leg raised, at work on a butterfly bigger than his head; and, crouching in a corner, frowning with concentration, bringing to visual life a coiled black panther. (In the first image, the lightbulb overhead swings to and fro; in the next, a jar holding Ivo’s brushes shatters, scattering them far and wide; take three, the stool tips onto its side.)
The following spread is divided into four scenes:
Ivo finds himself painting a large meaty sandwich.
He stops and frowns. Why hasn’t his mother called him to lunch? (Any child can read this thought on Ivo’s deftly rendered face.)
He goes upstairs. But the door at the top is stuck fast.
Puzzled, he goes back down and forces open a medieval-looking wooden door that leads to a rising flight of stone stairs and, beyond, a modest garden.
Another spread—this time one wide image, still wordless—shows Ivo from behind, paintbrush at his side, beholding a suburban landscape that is largely undestroyed (a few branches and shutters askew, a chimney leaning) but entirely monochromatic. Ivo himself is black and white.
On the next page, he looks down in alarm and confusion at his own grayness and then at the paint on the end of his brush: now black when, two pages back, it was red.
Ivo sets forth and encounters other children, emerging from their own homes, all equally puzzled by the sudden change in their world: the ashen flowers, the brooding black trees, the sun shining cold paper white. No one speaks; perhaps no one can. Ivo quickly leaves them behind, however, and plunges into a nearby wood. How long he wanders is unclear, but in a few pages he happens upon a panther—to the vigilant eye, exactly like the one seen lurking in the corner of his mural.
What follows, in a swift series of cardlike frames, is a kind of telepathic communication—not a conversation—in which Ivo, unafraid of the big cat, discovers that the creature is a man transformed by a curse to spend eternity speechless and colorless, pure jet black, unless he finds a fearless love.
The panther, however, grew impatient and jealous as well as lonely. Despairing, he bargained away his redemption, surrendering his immortality to a fairy in exchange for a cataclysm that would steal color from the rest of the world as well. If he was to live life deprived of color, so would everyone else.
The fairy, long departed, is never seen. For six pages, the boy and the panther seem to dance and tumble and spar with each other as the boy learns the cat’s story. Words, in this sequence, are few and far between. It’s clear that the story is being “told” through the ongoing tangle of boy with cat. Only on a recent read-through did it occur to Nick that, to a sophisticated adult reader, that tangle suggests Hercules wrestling with the lion, perhaps even Jacob with the angel. The boy and the panther seem to be fighting as much as playing, their limbs at times intertwined, their faces an emotional spectrum ranging from gaiety to grimace. A marvel, the way in which the images seem as sexual as they do purely playful—though how much is Nick projecting Andrew’s vision onto Lear’s?
At last, the boy and the big cat fall asleep together in a clearing, but when the boy awakens, he is alone.
Ivo was not dreaming, he discovers. The world is still like one of his mother’s old photographs: the leaves overhead a cloudy gray, the grass in shadow a mat of blackened bristle. He stands and stretches and closes his eyes, homesick and lonely. He stretches out his arms, from which his shirt hangs in shreds.
The next image is the one that frightened Nick (and surely he wasn’t alone in feeling this way). As the flying and creeping creatures land on or brush against Ivo, they regain their color, and as they fly out into the world, their flight paths brush color back into the air, through the trees, across the horizon, just as Ivo’s paintbrush colored the walls of his cellar.
Ivo searches for the panther but finds no sign of it. Emerging from the woods, he is greeted by the sight of the happy children of his neighborhood, their cheeks rosy again, their pinafores and pants cheerfully patterned once more. They are out in their gardens and on the pavement, jumping rope and playing marbles; they pay no heed to Ivo in his ragged clothing.